About the cabinet
We curate. We don’t invent.
Cabinet of Curiosities is a fine-art reproduction house. Every plate we sell began life in a real museum collection — a botanical study, a medieval star atlas, an engraved view of Rome — and every factual claim we make about it is true, sourced, and checked against the holding institution’s own record.
The curation promise
We only sell plates we can verify as public domain — cleared for reproduction, sourced from a named institution’s open-access release, and linked back to that institution’s own object record. A plate we haven’t finished verifying never goes up for sale; it stays out of the collection until it does. This is enforced in code, not just policy — see our rights-status build gate, which filters any unverified piece out of every public listing.
How we reproduce a plate
- We source the highest-resolution scan the holding institution has released — for most of the current collection, that’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access program.
- Every print is made to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper. The frame is a black box frame behind acrylic, no mat.
- Color is managed to the source scan, not adjusted for trend or taste.
- Every product page names the work, the creator, the origin and date, and the institution that holds it — the same information you’d find on a museum wall label.
Part of the Painted family
Cabinet of Curiosities is a sibling shop to Painted Myths — same commitment to museum-grade printing and honest sourcing, applied to the old world’s scientific and cartographic wonders instead of its myths.
More from the family cabinet
- Cartographer's Dream
The world, as the great mapmakers dreamed it — museum-grade for your wall.